Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to an apparatus for and a method of channel estimation, and more particularly, to an apparatus for and a method of compressing channel estimates to reduce buffer size.
Description of the Related Art
A typical communication receiver using coherent detection has a channel estimation (CE) block that estimates various channel gains affecting a signal as it travels from a transmitter to a receiver. The coherent receiver uses CE for data demodulation. The channel estimates produced by this block are often stored in a CE output buffer to be used by other blocks (e.g. a symbol detector) in the receiver chain. The number of stored channel estimates increases as communication protocols require support for multiple antennas and modulation carriers, such as increased bandwidth (e.g. multiple frequency carriers) and increased number of transmit and receive antennas. This causes the CE output buffer size to increase and occupy a significant portion of an integrated circuit (IC).